The Meta

Testing a robot soldier

It is foolish to believe that robot soldiers would be defect free. Remember – these defects would exist in a system designed to take human life.

Creating a robot soldier would be an extremely complex problem in software engineering, wrought with the chance for software defects and logical errors. There is no amount of testing that would expose all of these defects prior to the first field use of a given system. If you’ve used any software product, you know this: whether it be Windows, Office, or an ATM machine.

We can find examples of defects being exposed in the field by looking at existing military projects – such as the Patriot Missile system – which was far from bug free. Problems were hidden during military operations – state propaganda lauded the success of the Patriot during the Gulf War. Only when military operations ended did the true story become public.